What has Southasia been reading: 2021 Edition

As the year 2021 came to a close, we asked some of Himal's contributors and Southasia's prominent writers, translators, intellectuals and journalists about some of the most interesting books they read over the past year. Here's what they had to say.

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Geoffrey Aung (Anthropologist of Myanmar, and PhD candidate at Columbia University.)

Social Contagion: And Other Material on Microbiological Class War in China by Chuang. Charles H Kerr (2021)

Chuang is a collective of communists who locate the "China question" at the heart of contemporary capitalist contradictions. For years now, they have provided the most penetrating English-language analyses of capitalism and state power in China to be found anywhere, with a welcome emphasis on drawing out practical implications for communist struggle more broadly. This book, based on their article "Social Contagion," published in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak, is an indispensable guide to understanding the contradictions of the pandemic. It argues that, far from the notion of an authoritarian state that successfully controlled the outbreak, the Chinese state dramatically failed to do so. In the absence of an effective state response, instead, what has emerged has been a genuine global catastrophe only partially held at bay by the extraordinary actions of ordinary people, including volunteer networks in Wuhan where many volunteers died trying to contain the outbreak. This is essential reading for grappling with our present reality – and the possibility of overcoming it.